Kategoria BISAC: Poetry >> American - Asian American & Pacific Islander

The reader sees war, diaspora, and immigration, and hears the marginalized voices of women of color. The poems use lyrical diction and striking imagery to evoke the weight of an emotional and visceral journey. They grow and build in length and form, reflecting the gains the women in the poems make in re-creating selfhood...

"What our lives permit us to perceive as givens, Nguyen reveals as mere conditions, inextricably tied to and guided by greater forces--from the economy to the environment, from the Mayan predictions to the menstrual cycle, from the weight of history to the burden of the future." --Michael Brodeur, The Boston Globe

The poems in Violet Energy Ingots contain a sense of dis-ease, rupture, things frayed, and grief--as love shimmers the edges. Ryo Yamaguchi describes Nguyen's writing as "a kind of stuttering with intelligences, impressions, and emotions flaring up as the...

"Matthew Olzmann's poetry is that rare thing that embraces complication while, at every turn, filling us with wonder. Contradictions in the Design incorporates 'patterns among celestial bodies, the mysteries of Christ, X + Y, crossword puzzles, free will, ' but also the playfulness and oddities of life that allow us to laugh hardest at ourselves. Desire, Supervillains, Moby, and 'the idea of Moby': prepare yourself to be dazzled."C. Dale Young

These political poems employ humor to challenge the cultural norms of American society, focusing primarily on racism, social injustices...

"Blood Song" is the first full-length collection by poet Michael Schmeltzer.

Praise for "Blood Song"

There is a radical nostalgia at the heart of "Blood Song," a nostalgia that recovers the wounds of experience and brings it to a rich, imaginative culmination. In this way, the book's title is profoundly apt: on the one hand, Michael Schmeltzer's poems are about blood and the tragic consciousness that is the result of our being in time; on the other hand, the poems are about song, the reconciling artfulness that is the source of the best poetry. As one of Schmeltzer's canny speakers...

The keen eye of compassion in each detail, the steady touch of its cadence in each unfolding line.

Here is a perfect, clean and delicate (powerful and often terrifying) work of art. In its simplicity lies profound emotion, both beautiful and laden with sadness. These masterful slim poems speak with discipline and exquisite fervor. Catherine Strisik is a new voice already in full bloom. This is a very moving portrait of a land, its people, and the universal human spirit.

Pui Ying Wong's An Emigrant's Winter offers fresh eyes on both Chinese and American landscapes. Being the stranger gives the poet-narrator a visionary lens to see paint "almost undone / by humidity and time," to identify with a gecko "playing dead / with its eyes open." The poet is an undercover observer, hiding out front like the gecko, hiding to survive. Boundary-crossing poet Pui Ying Wong is always lyrical, no matter where she lights. By contrast with the images from Hong Kong ("the neighbors, quiet / as an unstrung guitar.") Wong's America is charged with big stories and...

Thousand Star Hotel confronts the silence around racism, police brutality, and the invisibility of the Asian American urban poor.

From "with thanks to Sahra Nguyen for the refugee style slogan"

They give the kids candy to bet.

My daughter loses the first four rounds,
she's a quiet wire as they take her candy away, piece by piece.
When she finally wins, I ask if she wants to play again.
No she shouts, grabbing her candy, I want to go home
True refugee style:
take everything you got and run with it.

Bao Phi is a National Poetry...

In the Hospital

My mother was in the hospital & everyone wanted to be my friend.
But I was busy making a list: good dog, bad citizen, short
skeleton, tall mocha. Typical...

Rooted in meditations on contemporary neuroscience, Brain Fever takes as its subject the mysteries of the human mind--the nature of dreams and memories, the possibly illusory nature of linear time, the complexity of conveying love to a child. In one poem, "A Bowl of Spaghetti," she cites a comparison that researchers draw between unraveling "the millions of miles of wires in the human] brain" and "untangling a bowl of spaghetti," and thus she untangles a memory of her own: "I have an old photo: Rei in her high chair intently / picking out each strand to mash in her mouth. // Was...